City Health Campus

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• Overview
• Kindness, compassion and dignity
• Treating people as individuals
• Independence, choice and control
• Responding to people’s immediate needs
• Workforce wellbeing and enablement

This means we looked for evidence that the service involved people and treated them with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect.

At our last assessment we rated this key question Good. At this assessment the rating has remained Good.

We have not awarded this service a score for Caring.

Find out about when we will not publish a key question score and what we look at when we assess Caring.

We scored the service as 3. The evidence showed a good standard. The service always treated people with kindness, empathy and compassion and respected their privacy and dignity. Staff treated colleagues from other organisations with kindness and respect.

Staff spoke and behaved kindly towards patients when interacting with them, and patients we spoke with were positive about staff. We saw several thank you cards from patients and their relatives on display on eye ward. The trust jointly funded 2 eye care liaison officers in partnership with a national sight loss charity who provided emotional as well as practical support to patients. They understood that as many service users saw them for the first time very shortly after learning that they may lose their sight, they may not retain all information at the time, and therefore followed up by telephone a couple of weeks after seeing them to check on their wellbeing and answer any questions they may have.

Staff largely maintained the privacy and dignity of patients, though we observed a doctor examining a patient in a side room as they had not closed the door or drawn a curtain.

We scored the service as 3. The evidence showed a good standard. The service treated people as individuals and made sure people’s care, support and treatment met people’s needs and preferences. They took account of people’s strengths, abilities, aspirations, culture and unique backgrounds and protected characteristics.

Staff were able to access face to face and telephone interpreters. A face to face interpreter was booked to go through all the necessary paperwork and checklists with a patient who did not speak English before their surgery. Staff found out who will be collecting the patient after surgery and whether they speak English, to ensure that discharge information is communicated.

We saw a poster in the waiting room of the eye ward for chaplaincy services which was accessible 24/7.

Family members could stay overnight with patients on a fold down bed, although there was little access to food and drink for visitors out of hours.

Patients could choose from a range of hot food at dinnertime including vegetarian, vegan, Caribbean and Asian food. There were simpler menus at breakfast and lunchtime, but most of the patients we spoke with said there was enough choice. A patient with food allergies was always able to order food according to their needs. We saw a large noticeboard on food safety on eye ward which included information about allergens and which foods were suitable for patients on different soft diets.

We scored the service as 3. The evidence showed a good standard. The service promoted people’s independence, so people knew their rights and had choice and control over their own care, treatment and wellbeing.

Patients we spoke with said staff explained their treatment well and felt able to ask questions about and be involved in their care.

The trust jointly funded 2 eye care liaison officers in partnership with a national sight loss charity. They promoted independence by providing advice and practical support including demonstrating accessible equipment for the household, helping set up accessibility tools and applications on digital devices, processing certificates of visual impairment, and signposting to advice on employment, benefits and to organisations teaching Braille.

We scored the service as 3. The evidence showed a good standard. The service listened to and understood people’s needs, views and wishes. Staff responded to people’s needs in the moment and acted to minimise any discomfort, concern or distress.

Staff were aware of and dealt with any patient specific risk issues. We observed staff working to minimise patient discomfort or distress. A report authored by the trust’s dementia officer praised theatre staffs’ approach to working with vulnerable patients; “I witnessed staff interacting with vulnerable patients with calmness, kindness and patience…it was noted that whenever a patient became uncomfortable or distressed staff had an immediate hands-off approach to alleviate patient anxiety and maintain patient safety.”

We scored the service as 2. The service did care about and promote the wellbeing of their staff, however the facilities did not always support staff wellbeing.

Staff spoke and behaved with kindness toward each other, and we observed good multidisciplinary teamworking. Staff we spoke with felt positive and proud to work for the service. One staff member stated that their team were “like a family”, another said they enjoyed their work and felt well supported. We saw thank you cards from former colleagues and students, and a ‘shout out’ award on display on the eye ward for “a 10/10 student nurse evaluation”. A student nurse we spoke with said staff were “friendly and welcoming.” Staff in theatre spoke about initiatives that had improved their wellbeing, including ‘rhythm of the day’ to check how staff were feeling, a book exchange, recipe swaps, and Friday breakfast, where staff ate together and shared positive reflections on the week. Festive lights with a switch-on ceremony were approved for the first time in the service’s history, with the aim to enhance staff and patient wellbeing throughout winter. The service had also secured funding to implement BMEC-specific staff recognition awards. Ophthalmology staff scored ‘Morale’ higher than the trust average in the latest annual staff survey.

However, some staff told us that rest areas were not adequate, and access to food and drink was very limited out of hours. We reviewed minutes from the latest meeting of the BMEC “Retained Estate” Regeneration and Wellbeing Working Group, and saw that refurbishment of the doctors’ mess, the introduction of a staff wellbeing room and out of hours catering were on the agenda, but were still in the early stages of planning. Staff stated that development opportunities were available to them if they wanted them. However one staff member we spoke with felt their training into a new post was ‘unstructured’ and they were at times ‘working above their pay grade’.